HEADLESS IN SLEEPY HOLLOW By John Calhoun From Entertainment Design, vol 33 n 10, November 1999 For Tim Burton's Latest, Production Designer Rick Heinrichs Conjures Washington Irving's Upstate New York Town in England Though Rick Heinrichs has never before acted as production designer on a Tim Burton movie, his association with the director goes back to the short films Vincent and Frankenweenie, made at Walt Disney Studios in the early 80s. As visual consultant, he supervised the 3D stop-motion animation seen in early form on the shorts, and which came into flower on the Burton production The Nightmare Before Christmas, in 1993. He also served as animation effects supervisor on the director's feature debut, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure; as visual effects consultant on Beetlejuice; as set designer on Edward Scissorhands; and art director on Batman Returns. Now, finally credited as production designer on Burton's upcoming Sleepy Hollow, Heinrichs has simply moved to another stage in his ongoing work with the director. He says the film, which Paramount Pictures will release November 19, is a full expression of "what comes out between us: a graphic, two-dimensional sensibility, brought into three dimensions." Burton and Washington Irving's story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are about as snug a fit as one can imagine. Set in 1799 in a custom-bound, upstate New York town of Dutch derivation, the tale has classic characters--Ichabod Crane, the Headless Horseman--tailor-made for the director's powers of eccentric realization. Who else to play the lopsided constable Crane but Johnny Depp, who had already essayed Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood for the director? And how else to capture the particular feel of the title town, where a series of murders have allegedly been committed by a decapitated phantom rider, but on a highly controlled movie soundstage--the proper setting, after all, for Burton's best work? "In the beginning, Sleepy Hollow was going to be a lower-budget, $30 million film we were going to shoot in New York State and New York City," says Heinrichs, who launched into the film after a year spent working on Burton's aborted Superman project. "Various things then happened, having nothing to do with the design of the film, that pushed it to a different level. Apart from that, though, we realized as we were developing the look that it just begged for a hand-crafted feel. The historic locations in upstate New York were interesting but limiting for us--they just weren't as expressive as we wanted. This wasn't a history lesson; we wanted to evoke an America that didn't quite exist, necessarily, but feels like it did. That channeled us into the groove of built sets, of a certain kind of lighting, of painted backings, and lots of fog and smoke. When you hit all of those things in a consistent way, with as much integrity in all the details as possible, you end up with a look that's imbued with an emotional content." From the outset, Burton harped on how he wanted to evoke the Hammer Films style--that is, the artifice-heavy look of low-budget horror movies produced by the English studio in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. He urged Heinrichs to check out examples like the 1968 Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, though the designer says he's never seen another influential work, Italian director Mario Bava's black-and-white Black Sunday. The look of Sleepy Hollow is somewhere between the lurid color of the typical Hammer product and the moodier style of Black Sunday--the palette is muted, almost black and white in color, with autumnal tones stressed in Colleen Atwood's costumes. "I think if Tim had his choice, he would make black-and-white movies," says Heinrichs of the director who has already made two, Frankenweenie and Ed Wood. "I'm glad the movie's in color, because it does make a range of emotions possible. But the limited palette is good, because if you start to have stronger primary colors, all of a sudden you've got elements pushing into the foreground that don't really belong." As for the Hammer connection, Heinrichs says, "I don't take that too far. Tim's very visual, but in our collaboration he's sketching out the broad strokes of what he's going for, and I'm processing it." Nevertheless, the director's affection for those foggy soundstage environments was one of many elements that drew the production in the direction of London. "[Producer] Scott Rudin has shot quite a bit over in London, and Tim of course did Batman there," says the designer. "There was a question of cost, I'm sure, and there was the acting pool too. There also is a good pool of art department talent in London; the acquired wisdom is that there are wonderful craftsmen. I say that not at the expense of Hollywood, where there arc plenty of great people. It's just that everything was tugging us towards London." After two months' prep in Los Angeles, during which time he made two scouting trips each to New York and London, Heinrichs moved his art department across the Atlantic for good in early September 1998. "Quite a bit had been done lookwise in LA, before we knew where we were going," he says. "I had about 10 people there, and then came to New York and was about to hire people, until we decided to go to London. Then I had to go to London to interview and hire. I ended up with about 20 people in the London art department," including supervising art director Les Tomkins, art director Ken Court, and set decorator Peter Young, an Academy Award winner for Batman. Staffing an art department is one of those managerial tasks Heinrichs, whose other production design credits include the Coen Brothers' Fargo and The Big Lebowski, is still growing accustomed to: "It's very key to how a movie ends up looking. Your set looks like how it's built, and how it's built is a function of the structure of the art department. It's like casting a film in a way. There's no school for it, you've just got to experience it." Principal shooting on Sleepy Hollow began about November 20 at Leavesden Studios, which had recently been vacated by Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. By then, the design of every set and sequence had been thoroughly worked out and tested. Apart from architectural surveys of surviving 18th-century structures in the Hudson Valley, Heinrichs' research delved into American folk art of the period. Then came a progression through concept, drawings, and detailed models of every location, done in close concert with Burton. Exteriors of the village of Sleepy Hollow, for example, evolved first from practical considerations--"We needed a main street that featured a church at the end of it, we needed a position to introduce the town from that took the whole thing in, and it needed to say hollow in its location"--to more atmospheric concerns--"It needed to have a mysterious, fog-enshrouded quality." Drawings and a model of the village helped the feeling of the town take shape. "I took influences from the Dutch, with the stepped-gable look, and also French domestic architecture, and the half-timbered English Tudor style," says Heinrichs. "I threw them in a baggie and shook them around to get a jumbled American style, and then piggybacked things with each other, to get a sense of almost abnormal growth going on. The idea was of a town that feels huddled and afraid, like the wagons are drawn up in a circle, and that also has an out-ofcontrol, chaotic element to the architecture. We put window gables onto roofs, and added elements to one style that you'd never see in real life." On the models and in the constructed sets, the last major element was texture. "They had great textures in those days--stone and brick and wood and shingles. Everything feels handmade. Since my background is in 3D sculpture, tactile sculptural qualities are very important to me: elements that utilize the space, thrust into the space, and take light." In this, the designer felt himself particularly in synch with the London craftspeople. "They have a way of building in England in which they do everything on pipe scaffolding, which is different than in LA," he explains. "They attach skins to things to get the textures." The village exterior, comprising 11 structures and an array of livestock, was the film's one major outdoor location, built on a private preserve in Lime Tree Valley, an hour north of London. "The up side of the English winter is that we weren't pushed into an October window of opportunity for shooting something as fall," says the designer. "We ended up shooting the town in January and February." But before that, interiors were shot. The first set to be photographed at Leavesden was the interior of the Van Tassel Manor House, Sleepy Hollow's largest home belonging to its leading citizen, Baltus Van Tassel (Michael Gambon). It is here that Ichabod Crane meets his true love, young Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci). The indoor finishes and textures followed from the exteriors. "We were always trying to exploit the look of the time, using the 3/6/08 10:51 PM The Tim Burton Collective - Headless in Sleepy Hollow exposed beams as elements in the design of the shots," says Heinrich. "We also did a painted mural inside the Van Tassel estate which wax very evocative of the paintings of the time. And fireplaces, which figured big in those days I lost count of how many fireplaces we did, of all kinds of shapes, sizes, textures, and materials." Leavesden Studios, a converted airplane factory, presented a bit of a hurdle for the production because of its relatively low ceilings. (This was less of an issue for Phantom Menace, in which set height was generally achieved by digital means.) What this meant, says Heinrichs, is that "your visual choices get channeled, so you end up with liabilities that you tend to exploit as virtues. When you've got a certain ceiling height, and you're dealing with painted backings, you need to push atmosphere and diffusion." This was particularly the case in several exteriors that were built on soundstages. "We would mitigate the disadvantages by hiding lights with teasers and smoke. Chivo [Emmanuel Lubezki], the DP, and I would have a chuckle now and then about how funky something would look, but when you see it cut together, it works great." One advantage of Leavesden was that it was exclusively devoted to Sleepy Hollow. "We were able to leave sets up, because we weren't being pursued by another production coming up right after us," says the designer. And the landing strips, flights sheds, and hangars at the facility were highly adaptable to the production's use. "There was a coach chase that we were going to do as an exterior," Heinrichs recalls, "but we had no good place to do it, and it just wasn't going to look right because of lighting and diffusion requirements. So we built a new set inside a very long flight hangar; we had to knock down some walls, and it ended up being about 350' long. We had the backing and trees on one side, and tree islands on wheels on the other." Another soundstage at Leavesden was dedicated to the "Forest to Field" set, for a scene in which the Headless Horseman races out of the woods and into a field. This stage was then transformed into, variously, a graveyard, a corn field, a field of harvested wheat, a churchyard, and a snowy battlefield. In addition, a small backlot area was devoted to a New York City street and waterfront tank. But one crucial set was simply too large to be contained at Leavesden. This was the Western Woods, with its gnarled "Tree of Dead," from which the Headless Horseman (who bears an uncanny resemblance at times to Christopher Walken) emerges. For this, the production moved to a 43'-tall, 120' x 250' stage with 360 Degrees backing at Shepperton Studios. As in other soundstage exteriors, the challenge here was to sell the look, and to believably blend it (strategically using smoke and diffusion and exploiting England's naturally gray climate) with the real exteriors of the town. Lighting is key, and Heinrichs says that Lubezki did a masterful job onstage creating soft, outdoor-style lighting. The designer says he loves the challenge of making exteriors onstage work. "Coming from the background Tim and I do," he says, "it's not that you're trying to completely fool the eye with the trompe-l'oeil effect. You want the stylization to come out of the way that you handle issues of perspective. As long as you're concentrated on something that's compelling and beautiful in its own way, I think the audience can accept a little bit of a funky quality. You get a layering of 3/6/08 10:51 PM The Tim Burton Collective - Headless in Sleepy Hollow Page 5 of 6 http://www.timburtoncollective.com/articles/sh2.html perspective, and of miniaturized things; if you have a painted backing, you layer elements in front that give the eye somewhere to go." Most of the soundstage exteriors were done in what Heinrichs refers to as "informal forced perspective, because it's not designed to be viewed from one point, it's designed to work for a camera in multiple points of view." In the case of the Western Woods, a thick tangle of forest under ominous skies, "you concentrate on getting the trees to overarch the road. You want proportion differences, from enormous, weirdly shaped trees, to trees that feel almost like they've been combed over the pathway. It's a very sculptural process, creating action paths and visual paths." And, as with the other sets, "All of the big questions are answered first on paper, and then in 3D--with character models, not just white architectural models." The greens budget on Sleepy Hollow, which came under Peter Young's purview, was more than $1 million--a significant percentage of the roughly $7 million art department budget. And the real trees, supplied by Palm Brokers, were only part of it. "Anything big had to be made," says Heinrichs. "We took molds off of real oak trees, and made 30'-tall fiberglass trees with welded steel structures that would hold up real branches." The centerpiece of this menacing forest is the Tree of Dead, with wide decaying branches and a gateway to the netherworld. "So many things had to happen with that--horses jumping out, graves being dug around it," says the designer. "The idea was to create something completely tortured looking, something with a very expressive, vigorous, almost anthropomorphic quality, but we had to keep bouncing back and forth between the look and the needs of action and special effects." The tree eventually consisted of carved foam on a steel frame, with branches and even real bark added to the painted plaster texture. Another iconic image in the film is a windmill, which figures in the climax. This structure, a kind of mirror of the Tree of Dead in its height and aura of rot, appears full-sized and in several scale miniatures. "We had it as a 1/12-scale miniature on some of our forced perspective sets, like an apple orchard looking off into the sky and hills beyond, with the miniature windmill in the background, and then bigger versions, up to 1/16, as you get closer to it," says Heinrichs. "We did a quarter-scale and full-scale versions in front of this huge backing, which was done as an exterior outside at Leavesden, but which appears to be onstage because of the way it was lit." Overall, Sleepy Hollow seems to be a production designer's dream, and the fact that it's all in the service of Burton's vision is part of what appeals to Heinrichs. "Tim could have been an excellent production designer, but everything would have ended up looking like his. It's better he's a director." Heinrichs, on the other hand, likes the mess of collaboration, of presenting ideas and having them embraced or shot down. He must, because once he decided to switch from animation to production design, he had to in effect start from the bottom of the field. "The process is like making sausage, you don't want to know what goes into it," he says. "It's busy and chaotic and conflicted and creative, it's what I love. If I just wanted to be an artist, I wouldn't have anywhere near as much fun as I do working with other people, and seeing what happens when you get that creative spark going."
So I watched a movie called "The Island," starring that Scarlett Johansen girl from "Girl with a pearl earring." The Island was about growing clones of people to insure them if one of their organs failed. The movie was very futuristic, so the lighting wasn't very convincing. It was very surreal and artificial. Much of it was probably touched up digitally. The only light that was convincing was in a scene that took place outside.
Sleepy hollow was a hilarious movie, and the heavy use of silhouettes was interesting. The blue fog of light was often used for the creepy scenes, and I felt that creepy mood. It seemed that some of the lighting in the scenes were digital though. The movie itself was quite surreal.
The movie "Sleepy Hollow" has always been one of my favorites. Sure, its funny and a little scary but overall I think its just silly. In a good way of course. Anyway, the lighting to me, was hard to figure out. Some of it looked fake for sure! But on the other hand, you never know. Some places can be that over cast and what not. Many silhouettes in the movie, which is totally necessary for a horror film. Leaves that mystery/suspense feeling on the audience. I remember the flash back scene when the headless horseman wasn't headless, there was a huge lightening storm as he's severing off people's heads. That was cool and all but the lightening effects were totally crappy. They looked really fake. But then as the flashback progressed and led on to the snowy scene, that was a little more believable. The lighting worked for that part of the movie. Actually, now that I think about it, most of the lightening in the movie was kinda not that great. Oh well. I agree with Tillman on his statement about some of the lights being digitized. Despite all that, I give the lighting a 6 out of 10 =D
This movie is great, I really like the way they shot the film, like how they made it look like night, but was it really shot at night? or did they just use filters? it could have even been filmed in a studio couldnt it have? well nomatter what they did i could always see the dimension in the shots it was really shot well.
The Lighting in Sleepy Hollow was really cool. I like how I can always tell when it is a Tim Burton Film. There were alot of scenes that look like it was shot at night. I'm not sure if it was artificial though..=/ Something about tim burton films are pretty creepy, from what i remember about the movie..it looked like they used a bluish fill & a greyish fill. I thought the fog in the movie was awesome.... it gave the movie a creepy feeling.
In the film that I made I used blue as my key light. When we did a scene outside i used regular light and bounced it off the side of the wall. Overall i think i did a pretty good job on it. If I could do anything different i would of probably used a brighter light inside the apartment because my actress was so dark, it was kind of hard to see her.
I thought you the “Sleepy Hollow” was a good movie. I liked how the lighting looked very natural all of the grays and blues. It really made “Sleepy Hollow” really sleepy it made me sleepy. I liked how natural it looked. There was a part in the beginning where two people were kissing but they just allowed you to see the outlines of the people not who they where I thought that was really good.
The movie "Sleepy Hollow" was an eye opener. In terms of lighting, i liked the way they created a depressive mood. I also like the way they managed to light the body but show the neck, wherer the head was chopped off at, in darkness.
7 comments:
Headless in Sleepy Hollow
HEADLESS IN SLEEPY HOLLOW
By John Calhoun
From Entertainment Design, vol 33 n 10, November 1999
For Tim Burton's Latest, Production Designer Rick Heinrichs Conjures
Washington Irving's Upstate New York Town in England
Though Rick Heinrichs has never before acted as production designer on a Tim
Burton movie, his association with the director goes back to the short films
Vincent and Frankenweenie, made at Walt Disney Studios in the early 80s. As
visual consultant, he supervised the 3D stop-motion animation seen in early form
on the shorts, and which came into flower on the Burton production The
Nightmare Before Christmas, in 1993. He also served as animation effects
supervisor on the director's feature debut, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure; as visual
effects consultant on Beetlejuice; as set designer on Edward Scissorhands; and
art director on Batman Returns. Now, finally credited as production designer on
Burton's upcoming Sleepy Hollow, Heinrichs has simply moved to another stage
in his ongoing work with the director. He says the film, which Paramount
Pictures will release November 19, is a full expression of "what comes out
between us: a graphic, two-dimensional sensibility, brought into three
dimensions."
Burton and Washington Irving's story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are about as
snug a fit as one can imagine. Set in 1799 in a custom-bound, upstate New York
town of Dutch derivation, the tale has classic characters--Ichabod Crane, the
Headless Horseman--tailor-made for the director's powers of eccentric
realization. Who else to play the lopsided constable Crane but Johnny Depp, who
had already essayed Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood for the director? And
how else to capture the particular feel of the title town, where a series of murders
have allegedly been committed by a decapitated phantom rider, but on a highly
controlled movie soundstage--the proper setting, after all, for Burton's best work?
"In the beginning, Sleepy Hollow was going to be a lower-budget, $30 million
film we were going to shoot in New York State and New York City," says
Heinrichs, who launched into the film after a year spent working on Burton's
aborted Superman project. "Various things then happened, having nothing to do
with the design of the film, that pushed it to a different level. Apart from that,
though, we realized as we were developing the look that it just begged for a
hand-crafted feel. The historic locations in upstate New York were interesting
but limiting for us--they just weren't as expressive as we wanted. This wasn't a
history lesson; we wanted to evoke an America that didn't quite exist,
necessarily, but feels like it did. That channeled us into the groove of built sets,
of a certain kind of lighting, of painted backings, and lots of fog and smoke.
When you hit all of those things in a consistent way, with as much integrity in all
the details as possible, you end up with a look that's imbued with an emotional
content."
From the outset, Burton harped on how he wanted to evoke the Hammer Films
style--that is, the artifice-heavy look of low-budget horror movies produced by
the English studio in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. He urged Heinrichs to check out
examples like the 1968 Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, though the
designer says he's never seen another influential work, Italian director Mario
Bava's black-and-white Black Sunday. The look of Sleepy Hollow is
somewhere between the lurid color of the typical Hammer product and the
moodier style of Black Sunday--the palette is muted, almost black and white in
color, with autumnal tones stressed in Colleen Atwood's costumes. "I think if
Tim had his choice, he would make black-and-white movies," says Heinrichs of
the director who has already made two, Frankenweenie and Ed Wood. "I'm
glad the movie's in color, because it does make a range of emotions possible. But
the limited palette is good, because if you start to have stronger primary colors,
all of a sudden you've got elements pushing into the foreground that don't really
belong."
As for the Hammer connection, Heinrichs says, "I don't take that too far. Tim's
very visual, but in our collaboration he's sketching out the broad strokes of what
he's going for, and I'm processing it." Nevertheless, the director's affection for
those foggy soundstage environments was one of many elements that drew the
production in the direction of London. "[Producer] Scott Rudin has shot quite a
bit over in London, and Tim of course did Batman there," says the designer.
"There was a question of cost, I'm sure, and there was the acting pool too. There
also is a good pool of art department talent in London; the acquired wisdom is
that there are wonderful craftsmen. I say that not at the expense of Hollywood,
where there arc plenty of great people. It's just that everything was tugging us
towards London."
After two months' prep in Los Angeles, during which time he made two scouting
trips each to New York and London, Heinrichs moved his art department across
the Atlantic for good in early September 1998. "Quite a bit had been done lookwise
in LA, before we knew where we were going," he says. "I had about 10
people there, and then came to New York and was about to hire people, until we
decided to go to London. Then I had to go to London to interview and hire. I
ended up with about 20 people in the London art department," including
supervising art director Les Tomkins, art director Ken Court, and set decorator
Peter Young, an Academy Award winner for Batman. Staffing an art department
is one of those managerial tasks Heinrichs, whose other production design credits
include the Coen Brothers' Fargo and The Big Lebowski, is still growing
accustomed to: "It's very key to how a movie ends up looking. Your set looks
like how it's built, and how it's built is a function of the structure of the art
department. It's like casting a film in a way. There's no school for it, you've just
got to experience it."
Principal shooting on Sleepy Hollow began about November 20 at Leavesden
Studios, which had recently been vacated by Star Wars, Episode 1: The
Phantom Menace. By then, the design of every set and sequence had been
thoroughly worked out and tested. Apart from architectural surveys of surviving
18th-century structures in the Hudson Valley, Heinrichs' research delved into
American folk art of the period. Then came a progression through concept,
drawings, and detailed models of every location, done in close concert with
Burton. Exteriors of the village of Sleepy Hollow, for example, evolved first
from practical considerations--"We needed a main street that featured a church at
the end of it, we needed a position to introduce the town from that took the
whole thing in, and it needed to say hollow in its location"--to more atmospheric
concerns--"It needed to have a mysterious, fog-enshrouded quality." Drawings
and a model of the village helped the feeling of the town take shape.
"I took influences from the Dutch, with the stepped-gable look, and also French
domestic architecture, and the half-timbered English Tudor style," says
Heinrichs. "I threw them in a baggie and shook them around to get a jumbled
American style, and then piggybacked things with each other, to get a sense of
almost abnormal growth going on. The idea was of a town that feels huddled and
afraid, like the wagons are drawn up in a circle, and that also has an out-ofcontrol,
chaotic element to the architecture. We put window gables onto roofs,
and added elements to one style that you'd never see in real life." On the models
and in the constructed sets, the last major element was texture. "They had great
textures in those days--stone and brick and wood and shingles. Everything feels
handmade. Since my background is in 3D sculpture, tactile sculptural qualities
are very important to me: elements that utilize the space, thrust into the space,
and take light." In this, the designer felt himself particularly in synch with the
London craftspeople. "They have a way of building in England in which they do
everything on pipe scaffolding, which is different than in LA," he explains.
"They attach skins to things to get the textures."
The village exterior, comprising 11 structures and an array of livestock, was the
film's one major outdoor location, built on a private preserve in Lime Tree
Valley, an hour north of London. "The up side of the English winter is that we
weren't pushed into an October window of opportunity for shooting something as
fall," says the designer. "We ended up shooting the town in January and
February."
But before that, interiors were shot. The first set to be photographed at
Leavesden was the interior of the Van Tassel Manor House, Sleepy Hollow's
largest home belonging to its leading citizen, Baltus Van Tassel (Michael
Gambon). It is here that Ichabod Crane meets his true love, young Katrina Van
Tassel (Christina Ricci). The indoor finishes and textures followed from the
exteriors. "We were always trying to exploit the look of the time, using the
3/6/08 10:51 PM The Tim Burton Collective - Headless in Sleepy Hollow
exposed beams as elements in the design of the shots," says Heinrich. "We also
did a painted mural inside the Van Tassel estate which wax very evocative of the
paintings of the time. And fireplaces, which figured big in those days I lost count
of how many fireplaces we did, of all kinds of shapes, sizes, textures, and
materials."
Leavesden Studios, a converted airplane factory, presented a bit of a hurdle for
the production because of its relatively low ceilings. (This was less of an issue
for Phantom Menace, in which set height was generally achieved by digital
means.) What this meant, says Heinrichs, is that "your visual choices get
channeled, so you end up with liabilities that you tend to exploit as virtues. When
you've got a certain ceiling height, and you're dealing with painted backings, you
need to push atmosphere and diffusion." This was particularly the case in several
exteriors that were built on soundstages. "We would mitigate the disadvantages
by hiding lights with teasers and smoke. Chivo [Emmanuel Lubezki], the DP,
and I would have a chuckle now and then about how funky something would
look, but when you see it cut together, it works great."
One advantage of Leavesden was that it was exclusively devoted to Sleepy
Hollow. "We were able to leave sets up, because we weren't being pursued by
another production coming up right after us," says the designer. And the landing
strips, flights sheds, and hangars at the facility were highly adaptable to the
production's use. "There was a coach chase that we were going to do as an
exterior," Heinrichs recalls, "but we had no good place to do it, and it just wasn't
going to look right because of lighting and diffusion requirements. So we built a
new set inside a very long flight hangar; we had to knock down some walls, and
it ended up being about 350' long. We had the backing and trees on one side, and
tree islands on wheels on the other."
Another soundstage at Leavesden was dedicated to the "Forest to Field" set, for a
scene in which the Headless Horseman races out of the woods and into a field.
This stage was then transformed into, variously, a graveyard, a corn field, a field
of harvested wheat, a churchyard, and a snowy battlefield. In addition, a small
backlot area was devoted to a New York City street and waterfront tank.
But one crucial set was simply too large to be contained at Leavesden. This was
the Western Woods, with its gnarled "Tree of Dead," from which the Headless
Horseman (who bears an uncanny resemblance at times to Christopher Walken)
emerges. For this, the production moved to a 43'-tall, 120' x 250' stage with 360
Degrees backing at Shepperton Studios. As in other soundstage exteriors, the
challenge here was to sell the look, and to believably blend it (strategically using
smoke and diffusion and exploiting England's naturally gray climate) with the
real exteriors of the town. Lighting is key, and Heinrichs says that Lubezki did a
masterful job onstage creating soft, outdoor-style lighting.
The designer says he loves the challenge of making exteriors onstage work.
"Coming from the background Tim and I do," he says, "it's not that you're trying
to completely fool the eye with the trompe-l'oeil effect. You want the stylization
to come out of the way that you handle issues of perspective. As long as you're
concentrated on something that's compelling and beautiful in its own way, I think
the audience can accept a little bit of a funky quality. You get a layering of
3/6/08 10:51 PM The Tim Burton Collective - Headless in Sleepy Hollow
Page 5 of 6 http://www.timburtoncollective.com/articles/sh2.html
perspective, and of miniaturized things; if you have a painted backing, you layer
elements in front that give the eye somewhere to go."
Most of the soundstage exteriors were done in what Heinrichs refers to as
"informal forced perspective, because it's not designed to be viewed from one
point, it's designed to work for a camera in multiple points of view." In the case
of the Western Woods, a thick tangle of forest under ominous skies, "you
concentrate on getting the trees to overarch the road. You want proportion
differences, from enormous, weirdly shaped trees, to trees that feel almost like
they've been combed over the pathway. It's a very sculptural process, creating
action paths and visual paths." And, as with the other sets, "All of the big
questions are answered first on paper, and then in 3D--with character models,
not just white architectural models."
The greens budget on Sleepy Hollow, which came under Peter Young's purview,
was more than $1 million--a significant percentage of the roughly $7 million art
department budget. And the real trees, supplied by Palm Brokers, were only part
of it. "Anything big had to be made," says Heinrichs. "We took molds off of real
oak trees, and made 30'-tall fiberglass trees with welded steel structures that
would hold up real branches." The centerpiece of this menacing forest is the Tree
of Dead, with wide decaying branches and a gateway to the netherworld. "So
many things had to happen with that--horses jumping out, graves being dug
around it," says the designer. "The idea was to create something completely
tortured looking, something with a very expressive, vigorous, almost
anthropomorphic quality, but we had to keep bouncing back and forth between
the look and the needs of action and special effects." The tree eventually
consisted of carved foam on a steel frame, with branches and even real bark
added to the painted plaster texture.
Another iconic image in the film is a windmill, which figures in the climax. This
structure, a kind of mirror of the Tree of Dead in its height and aura of rot,
appears full-sized and in several scale miniatures. "We had it as a 1/12-scale
miniature on some of our forced perspective sets, like an apple orchard looking
off into the sky and hills beyond, with the miniature windmill in the background,
and then bigger versions, up to 1/16, as you get closer to it," says Heinrichs. "We
did a quarter-scale and full-scale versions in front of this huge backing, which
was done as an exterior outside at Leavesden, but which appears to be onstage
because of the way it was lit."
Overall, Sleepy Hollow seems to be a production designer's dream, and the fact
that it's all in the service of Burton's vision is part of what appeals to Heinrichs.
"Tim could have been an excellent production designer, but everything would
have ended up looking like his. It's better he's a director." Heinrichs, on the other
hand, likes the mess of collaboration, of presenting ideas and having them
embraced or shot down. He must, because once he decided to switch from
animation to production design, he had to in effect start from the bottom of the
field. "The process is like making sausage, you don't want to know what goes
into it," he says. "It's busy and chaotic and conflicted and creative, it's what I
love. If I just wanted to be an artist, I wouldn't have anywhere near as much fun
as I do working with other people, and seeing what happens when you get that
creative spark going."
So I watched a movie called "The Island," starring that Scarlett Johansen girl from "Girl with a pearl earring." The Island was about growing clones of people to insure them if one of their organs failed. The movie was very futuristic, so the lighting wasn't very convincing. It was very surreal and artificial. Much of it was probably touched up digitally. The only light that was convincing was in a scene that took place outside.
Sleepy hollow was a hilarious movie, and the heavy use of silhouettes was interesting. The blue fog of light was often used for the creepy scenes, and I felt that creepy mood. It seemed that some of the lighting in the scenes were digital though. The movie itself was quite surreal.
The movie "Sleepy Hollow" has always been one of my favorites. Sure, its funny and a little scary but overall I think its just silly. In a good way of course. Anyway, the lighting to me, was hard to figure out. Some of it looked fake for sure! But on the other hand, you never know. Some places can be that over cast and what not. Many silhouettes in the movie, which is totally necessary for a horror film. Leaves that mystery/suspense feeling on the audience. I remember the flash back scene when the headless horseman wasn't headless, there was a huge lightening storm as he's severing off people's heads. That was cool and all but the lightening effects were totally crappy. They looked really fake. But then as the flashback progressed and led on to the snowy scene, that was a little more believable. The lighting worked for that part of the movie. Actually, now that I think about it, most of the lightening in the movie was kinda not that great. Oh well. I agree with Tillman on his statement about some of the lights being digitized. Despite all that, I give the lighting a 6 out of 10 =D
This movie is great, I really like the way they shot the film, like how they made it look like night, but was it really shot at night? or did they just use filters? it could have even been filmed in a studio couldnt it have? well nomatter what they did i could always see the dimension in the shots it was really shot well.
The Lighting in Sleepy Hollow was really cool. I like how I can always tell when it is a Tim Burton Film. There were alot of scenes that look like it was shot at night. I'm not sure if it was artificial though..=/ Something about tim burton films are pretty creepy, from what i remember about the movie..it looked like they used a bluish fill & a greyish fill. I thought the fog in the movie was awesome.... it gave the movie a creepy feeling.
In the film that I made I used blue as my key light. When we did a scene outside i used regular light and bounced it off the side of the wall. Overall i think i did a pretty good job on it. If I could do anything different i would of probably used a brighter light inside the apartment because my actress was so dark, it was kind of hard to see her.
I thought you the “Sleepy Hollow” was a good movie. I liked how the lighting looked very natural all of the grays and blues. It really made “Sleepy Hollow” really sleepy it made me sleepy. I liked how natural it looked. There was a part in the beginning where two people were kissing but they just allowed you to see the outlines of the people not who they where I thought that was really good.
The movie "Sleepy Hollow" was an eye opener. In terms of lighting, i liked the way they created a depressive mood. I also like the way they managed to light the body but show the neck, wherer the head was chopped off at, in darkness.
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